Jan 9, 2010

For those who are keeping score, the Andromeda Underground forums are in the process of maintenance, upgrades and server migrations. What started as our upgrade to vBulletin 4.0 has now been incorporated to a full server migration and update. As a result of these sweeping upgrades and changes, the forums will be pretty buggy as we work out glitches and update our plugins to the latest versions to restore our original functionality for vBulletin 4.0. As a result, expect that the forums will be sporadically taken offline for lengths of time as we continue performing maintenance and upgrades in line with these changes.

Along with this major upgrade, we have been migrating the system to a more capable server system as well, so please bare with us as we make these changes and upgrades going forward. The andromedaunderground.com domain still works, but for the time being is redirecting to the secondary TLD in order to alleviate prior compatibility issues which were found on January 7th, 2010. Database migration seems to be completed and all user accounts remain intact, though crisis was narrowly averted which would have left us starting from scratch, thanks to the help of our own COO Damon "Cybernome" Miles.

The Legacy theme for Andromeda Underground has been disabled as a result of the vBulletin 4.0 upgrade due to compatibility issues, and we are currently in the process of customizing the theme for the new forums over a long term process in order to closely approximate what we originally had in the 3.8 version.

Some plugins are currently on hold while we await proper updated versions, so again please be patient as we restore functionality as quickly as we can.

For members who are using a bookmarked address, please be advised that the raw address previously used is no longer valid due to the server migration and will return a 404 error as of January 8th 2010. The new address you should be using (and should have been using instead of the raw address) is http://www.andromedaunderground.com in order to properly redirect and keep your links up to date. As always, we highly advise our members to use only the andromedaunderground.com address to access the forums instead of bookmarking the raw domains that it may point to.

As of February 1st 2010, we will begin experimenting with Google Adsense in order to partially alleviate the rising costs of running the Andromeda Underground system. Our statistics are showing that we are receiving a large number of visitors per day who are not registered users of our forums, and as such our bandwidth is soaring.

Remember, the Andromeda Underground is a private system by invitation only and is an excellent resource for expert analysis and brainstorming for new technologies and projects related to the Andromeda Media Group team. Contained therein are a vast library of documentation, whitepapers, research, and source code which overall are not always available to the public. in order to remain a private venture, we must look for manners by which to continue to keep our operating costs under control. We ask for your understanding concerning the implementation of Google Adsense on February 1st 2010, and ask that you remain within the Terms of Service as outlined within the forums publicly (in the event that donations are not ample to cover cost of operation Andromeda Underground reserves the right to display advertising).

Within the SecondLife platform, an official Andromeda Media group has been formed with appropriate tags for all of our private members. If you are a member of Andromeda Media Group and also use SecondLife, please contact Aeonix Aeon in world to establish your group membership and official tag.

We would like to acknowledge and thank our benefactors for their contributions, and we would also like to take this time to wish everyone a Happy New Year as well, in the hopes that our group will see strides in progress with the various Andromeda Labs projects currently underway.

To this end, thank you all for your participation and continued interest in Andromeda Media Group! We look forward to a productive and fruitful 2010!